1.

In the last Group Session on 6th, Nov.

After a Thursday seminar, everyone in Group 5 has divided into 4 small groups, depending on their interests in Art; In every presentation, one person wrote down key words and interests of the person giving a presentation.

<Social&Political/Digital>

The circle (Novel – recommended by Sophie) / You Are Too Much (Youtube Channel)/

(1) A thing like you and me –>

But what if the truth is neither in the represented nor in the representation?What if the truth is in its material configuration? What if the medium is really a message? Or actually—in its corporate media version—a barrage of commodified intensities?

To participate in an image—rather than merely identify with it—could perhaps abolish this relation. This would mean participating in the material of the image as well as in the desires and forces it accumulates. How about acknowledging that this image is not some ideological misconception, but a thing simultaneously couched in affect and availability, a fetish made of crystals and electricity, animated by our wishes and fears—a perfect embodiment of its own conditions of existence? As such, the image is—to use yet another phrase of Walter Benjamin’s—without expression.

6 It doesn’t represent reality. It is a fragment of the real world. It is a thing just like any other—a thing like you and me.

This shift in perspective has far-reaching consequences. There might still be an internal and inaccessible trauma that constitutes subjectivity. But trauma is also the contemporary opium of the masses—an apparently private property that simultaneously invites and resists foreclosure. And the economy of this trauma constitutes the remnant of the independent subject. But then if we are to acknowledge that subjectivity is no longer a privileged site for emancipation, we might as well just face it and get on with it.

On the other hand, the increased appeal of becoming a thing doesn’t necessarily mean that we have reached the age of unlimited positivity, whose prophets—if we are to believe them—extol an age in which desire flows freely, negativity and history are a thing of the past, and vital drives happily splash all over the place.

No, the negativity of the thing can be discerned by its bruises, which mark the site of history’s impact. As Eyal Weizman and Tom Keenan remark in a fascinating conversation on forensics and the fetish, objects increasingly take on the role of witnesses in court cases concerned with human rights violations.7The bruises of things are deciphered, and then subjected to interpretation. Things are made to speak—often by subjecting them to additional violence. The field of forensics can be understood as the torture of objects, which are expected to tell all, just as when humans are interrogated. Things often have to be destroyed, dissolved in acid, cut apart, or dismantled in order to tell their full story. To affirm the thing also means participating in its collision with history.

Because a thing is usually not a shiny new Boeing taking off on its virgin flight. Rather, it might be its wreck, painstakingly pieced together from scrap inside a hangar after its unexpected nosedive into catastrophe. A thing is the ruin of a house in Gaza. A film reel lost or destroyed in civil war. A female body tied up with ropes, fixed in obscene positions. Things condense power and violence. Just as a thing accumulates productive forces and desires, so does it also accumulate destruction and decay.

So then how about a specific thing called “image”? It is a complete mystification to think of the digital image as a shiny immortal clone of itself. On the contrary, not even the digital image is outside history. It bears the bruises of its crashes with politics and violence. It is nothing like, say, a carbon copy of Leon Trotsky brought back to life through digital manipulation (though of course it could show him); rather, the material articulation of the image is like a clone of Trotsky walking around with an ice pick in his head. The bruises of images are its glitches and artifacts, the traces of its rips and transfers.Images are violated, ripped apart, subjected to interrogation and probing. They are stolen, cropped, edited, and re-appropriated. They are bought, sold, leased. Manipulated and adulated. Reviled and revered. To participate in the image means to take part in all of this.

17,Nov. 2nd Group meeting. <K-Hole>

THE DEATH OF AGE

It used to be possible to be special — to sustain unique. differences through time, relative to a certain sense of audience. As long as you were different from the people around you, you were safe. But the Internet and globalization fucked this up. for everyone…

Sameness is not to be mistaken for minimalism. You gain a temporary mobility and a sense of being unencumbered by making fewer and more considered decisions. But going back to basics doesn’t work when the scripts that determine the basics are out of whack. Eventually, you end up stalling. Your groove dissolves into a rut.

When differentiation happens according to some sort of ordered progression, shit’s only getting more authentic. You’re vegetarian before you’re vegan, and vegan before you’re a gluten-free vegan locavore.

NORMCORE

Once upon a time people were born into communities and had to find their individuality. Today people are born individuals and have to find their communities.

Mass Indie responds to this situation by creating cliques of people in the know, while Normcore knows the real feat is harnessing the potential for connection to spring up. It’s about adaptability, not exclusivity. … …

Normcore moves away from a coolness that relies on difference to a post-authenticity coolness that opts in to sameness. But instead of appropriating an aestheticized version of the mainstream, it just cops to the situation at hand. To be truly Normcore, you need to understand that there’s no such thing as normal.

The website shows screen shots of psycho men talking to women once rejected. What’s interesting for me is, seeing many people sharing their ‘fun’ experiences in public so openly. The joy from laughing at other’s stories and getting feedback to what they put would be driving force of the ‘trend’ , ‘culture’

Posts are constantly uploaded so that replaced by thousands of new posts.

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-it was a pool party that was there to fake. The idea as far as on digital. Medial; Instagram, Facebook and Twitter/ people put a fake identity and you go see and realise things are totally different.

-When pictures were uploaded on Facebook, our friends, people were surprised; most of them believing it was the real pool at the room or something. So the reaction was interesting — “oh my god. was that real pool?? how did you do that??” “You should have let me know! that looks so cool!”

Q: Are we going to be there, presenting?

-We were considering of the idea that presenting our work on screen and talking with tutor and peers over the phone though online(not in person)/ on Skype or Web cam — because our whole idea was about Social Media Culture, with ambiguity and confusion of identity and information given online ;;; the actual us, people who are presenting work exist over the phone; digital device but at the same time we do not exist on the stage so we are faked and replaced by digital images of us. ///

We still need to talk about how we will present work.

‘Projecting the pool’ on the stage on the day of symposium…? (another idea)

Final Writing==================================

Hito Steyerl and her text ‘A Thing Like You and Me’ talks about images as a fragment of the real world, how rather than identifying with an image we should participate in an image; in the materiality of it…seeing it as a thing (like you and me) not as a mere representation of reality. Hito says that ‘The bruises of images are its glitches and artifacts, the traces of its rips and transfers. Images are violated, ripped apart, subjected to interrogation and probing. They are stolen, cropped, edited and re-appropriated…to participate in the images means to take part in all of this’.

The video we made tries to demonstrate this quote…a digital collage of images and videos stolen, edited and re-appropriated to create a sort of ambiguous narrative based around the idea of a fake pool party we held last week.

The fake pool party was a social experiment, made from perspex, water projections and props, we invited people to come to our pool party to see how they would interact with it. The video can be seen as a response to the pool party event, participating in the images and footage we initially collected and those found online, and playing around with the relationship between the real vs fake.

Identification is important in recent advertising campaigns such as Android’s ‘Be together, not the same’ campaign, ‘I am Different. I am Nikon’ and personalization through products like Starbucks coffee, Nutella jars and Coke bottles. Western corporations have utilised methods from gift economies of sharing with a community for profit. sharing an image of a coke can with your name on it with your friends keeps that image in circulation.

Fashion forecasting collective k-hole suggest that once upon a time people were born into communities and had to find their individuality.

Today people are born individuals and have to find their communities, for example being part of a generation or being an aries.

The way we participate in images, communication, identities or our subjectivities has been assimilated by late capitalism and a neoliberal ‘be yourself’ and ‘express yourself’ dialogue to facilitate profit and hide structural violence.

Hito steyerl writes that subjectivity is no longer a privileged site for emancipation because although being a subject suggests a degree of control, it’s reality is rather one of being subject to power relations.

The term curation has shifted from the physical world into the virtual, visible information is carefully controlled and densely manipulated, as we upload, erase, edit and rework ourselves. Identity is fluid, unstable and eternally adapting thus illuminating the evolution of the social consciousness, we have the ability to experience true freedom, intimacy and anonymity.